CONSUMER RIGHTS / PRODUCT REPORTS

A Rutherford County judge has ordered 23 stores (mostly smoke shops) to be padlocked and shut down following a police investigation which discovered the shops were selling CBD (cannabidiol). So proud of their work were the police, the Sheriff and the District Attorney, that they held a press conference outside one of the shuttered stores. But what started out as a proclamation of good policing quickly turned into a mockery of the justice system.

It's common knowledge that San Francisco has a serious homelessness problem. Estimates of the size of the city's streetbound population vary between 6,000 and 10,000, depending on the source. But that population, largely confined to a few nonresidential downtown neighborhoods, can too easily become invisible to most residents.

One thing isn't invisible, however: the problem of human poop on sidewalks. Since the city slashed funding for Parks and Recreation in 2009, there's a distinct shortage of working public bathrooms. And that led to a spike in reports of public pooping to the city's 311 help line.

Yesterday, the CDC announced that they believe an outbreak of at least 28 cases of salmnella infection in 20 US states has been linked to kratom products. Immediately, astonishingly fast in fact every mainstream outlet you could think of from CNN to Time picked up the story.

In recent years the defects in the peer review system have been the subject of a profusion of critical editorials and studies in the literature. It is high time that the world took heed of what the critics are saying, not least of all because of the medical and health ramifications.

The war on drugs is still in full effect. A reminder came earlier this week when the FBI released new crime statistics showing a 1.6 percent increase in marijuana-related arrests in 2016 compared to 2015.

“It made me feel awful…I was more frightened of the chemo than the cancer…I could feel it (the chemo) draining me and killing me. I felt I was dying”

Four years later from that traumatic time, she explained how, despite turning down chemo, she is happy and cancer-free. Hayley, now 66, credits her survival to the alternative treatments she used to heal her body. She changed her diet and cut out foods that “feeds the cancer” including sugar, dairy and acid creating foods. And she also embarked on a serious course of exercise and meditation.

It can be quite surprising to find out that your facial scrub, body wash or toothpaste contain thousands of tiny plastic microbeads. What’s even more appalling is the fact that thousands of tons of these microbeads end up in the ocean every year. Because of this staggering impact on our waterways and oceans, the U.K. has joined the U.S. in a ban of plastic microbeads in cosmetics and personal care products.

A team of Danish and French researchers have found that ibuprofen may be one of the culprits responsible for male infertility. The study showed that daily intake of the drug creates a hormonal condition associated with impaired fertility, depression and increased risk of cardiovascular events.

At a followup visit a year after Elizabeth Moreno had a disk removed to successfully treat her crippling pain, her doctor asked her to leave a urine sample; a few months later, Sunset Labs LLC of Houston sent her a bill for $17,800.

Moreno's doctor had seemingly ordered the urine test to ensure that she hadn't abused her post-operative opioid pain medication, but he didn't just order tests for opioids: he also asked the lab to check for indicators of "cocaine, methadone, anti-anxiety drugs and several other drugs she had never heard of" including amphetamines and PCP.

Those unnecessary tests could certainly raise the price on a simple urine test, but it gets worse because of Sunset Labs' crazy price-gouging: the amphetamine test was $1,700 and the PCP test was $425. The lab also charged an eye-popping $850 for a pair of simple tests meant to detect tampering with the sample.

Published on Feb 16, 2018**Disclaimer** - None of this information in this video is financial advice and should not be taken as financial advice. Merely my thoughts and experiences that I've summed up.

In this video I go over whatis Ethereum in 3 minutes!

Shout out to Wy, from the DigiPulse community Telegram group for putting the below information together.

Considering the high rate of wheat consumption, one wouldn’t suspect that the wheat industry has created a massive problem. Yet, looking at the facts surrounding this industry and this food source will give you pause.

The French government is considering whether to up its fight against the preplanned obsolescence of electronic goods and home appliances by introducing a “lifetime” index label on such products to alert customers of their durability.

France’s government is contemplating whether to introduce a measure that would see all electronic goods and home appliances sold in the country carry labels that inform the general public of the products’ actual lifespan.

The stickers would take the shape of a colour index similar to those found on energy consumption labels on household appliances like washing machines. Each product will get a grade from 1 to 10, rated for its build quality, repairability and durability.

If the measure is approved, it will be voluntary from 2020 onwards and then made mandatory, Secretary of State to the Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition Brune Poirson is reported as saying by Le Parisien.

Bitcoin is revolutionizing the $1.8 trillion global payments industry and people around the world are rethinking the meaning of their money. Moreover, the underlying technology and network that process Bitcoin transactions, known as blockchain, is transforming industries as varied as banking, farming, logistics, healthcare, elections and manufacturing, to name a few.

Published on Feb 10, 2018 - At the Satoshi Roundtable in Cancun this year I got to sit down with the amazing Ron Paul and discuss why cryptocurrency is important. Dr Paul is a hero of the liberty movement especially because of the work he's done to spread awareness about the problems of government-controlled money and the federal reserve, so he is a huge inspiration for many of those involved with cryptocurrency. It was amazing to have him with us at the roundtable.

Back in 2016 we wrote about how Landis+Gyr, a large multinational company owned by Toshiba, completely freaked out when it discovered that documents about its smart energy meters, which the city of Seattle had contracted to use, were subject to a FOIA request. As we noted, Landis+Gyr went legal and did so in perhaps the nuttiest way possible. First it demanded the documents be taken down from Muckrock -- the platform that makes it easy for journalists and others to file FOIA requests. Then it demanded that Muckrock reveal the details of anyone who might have seen the documents in question. It then sued Muckrock and somehow got a court to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Muckrock for posting these public records.

Society may be playing a larger role than we think. As the years press on, pop culture references drugs more than ever before. As well, virtual social identity becomes more prevalent, and more of us become slaves to acceptable vices like caffeine and sugar.

Jeff Sessions, a son of the South and President Trump’s attorney general, celebrated former President Abraham Lincoln’s 209th birthday with a blunt and bold statement that clashes with some of his fellow Alabamians and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Speaking Monday at the Union League of Philadelphia’s Annual Lincoln Day celebration, he said slavery alone was the cause of the Civil War.

Chinese iPhone manufacturer Foxconn plans to slash more than 10,000 jobs this year as part of an aggressive robot takeover. Innolux, Foxconn’s LCD-display arm is said to bear the brunt of the lost jobs. According to Honorary Chairman Tuan Hsing-Chien:

We will reduce our total workforce to less than 50,000 people by the end of this year, from the 60,000 staff at the end of 2017.

This just days after Foxconn Chairmain Terry Gou reported the company would invest some $342 million into processes and equipment to make better use of artificial intelligence in its manufacturing process.

Web pioneer, author, and serial entrepreneur David Siegel challenges the SEC's stance on digital currencies and consideration of tokens as securities.

By David Siegel
Updated February 5, 2018 10:38 GMT

The goal of the SEC is to keep retail investors safe. On January 25th, Jay Clayton of the SEC and J. Christopher Giancarlo of the CFTC published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (ungated here), in which they wrote:

SOURCE: EFF
Today, we delivered a petition to the U.S. Copyright Office to keep copyright’s safe harbors safe. We asked the Copyright Office to remove a bureaucratic requirement that could cause websites and Internet services to lose protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And we asked them to help keep Congress from replacing the DMCA safe harbor with a mandatory filtering law. Internet users from all over the U.S. and beyond added their voices to our petition.

Under current law, the owners of websites and online services can be protected from monetary liability when their users are accused of infringing copyright through the DMCA “safe harbors.” In order to take advantage of these safe harbors, owners must meet many requirements, including participating in the notorious notice-and-takedown procedure for allegedly infringing content. They also must register an agent—someone who can respond to takedown requests—with the Copyright Office.

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To other independent blogs out there, please; keep aware of the ever-changing nature of these laws on the net, engineered to destroy the independent media, and keep us from telling the truth as we see it.

DuPont’s toxic legacy has left a trail around the United States — with some of the most visible harm taking place in the Midwest and along the Mississippi River. The after-effects of teflon production are so profound that a whole region of the country is dubbed “Cancer Alley.”

A Florida man claims one of his Apple AirPods blew up as he worked out at the gym.

Jason Colon, of Tampa, said on Thursday he noticed white smoke coming out of the painfully trendy headphone bud, set the gizmo down on his workout machine, and went off to get an LA Fitness staffer for help. When he came back, Colon says, one of the pods had ruptured and was a charred mess.

"I don’t know what would’ve happened to my ear,” he told US East Coast news station WFLA. “But I’m sure since it hangs down, it could’ve been [my] ear lobe.”